In my last blog post I introduced Dimster (DIMensional teSTER), a performance benchmarking tool for Apache Kafka with a specific set of philosophies. In this first share group benchmarking post, we’re going to use share groups as they are not intended to be used, but for a good reason. Share groups allow you to move past partitions as the unit of parallelism by allowing multiple consumers to read from the same partition, using message queue semantics. We’ll run those kinds of tests in th...

When I start writing, sometimes I go to the search engine on my website to see if I have written about a topic before. I did this when I was writing background; foreground . I had been thinking about the contrast between backgrounds and foregrounds for a while, so I wondered if I had any posts on the topic. I typed “background and foreground” into my site search engine with hope that the tool would interpret the query as “show posts that include the words ‘background’ and ‘foregroun...

When she was a graduate student in the 1970s, the evolutionary biologist Kerstin Johannesson regularly walked the shores of a Swedish archipelago, scanning the ground for pebbles that moved: marine snails. Her adviser, a taxonomist, had tasked her with describing the species present there by documenting their traits. She noticed that snails with thicker shells stayed on the shore… Source When she was a graduate student in the 1970s, the evolutionary biologist Kerstin Johannesson regularly w...

This week on the People and Blogs series we have an interview with Piri, whose blog can be found at pketh.org . Tired of RSS? Read this in your browser or sign up for the newsletter . People and Blogs is supported by the "One a Month" club members. If you enjoy P&B, consider becoming one for as little as 1 dollar a month. Let's start from the basics: can you introduce yourself? Hey, I'm Piri. I'm a software designer, engineer, and artis...

TIL: Symlinking NixOS Dotfiles May 21, 2026 The standard answer to managing dotfiles on NixOS is home-manager . I’ve never used it, due to two aesthetic and one practical objection: I avoid dependencies, especially in nix, which rivals Python in the number of approaches to dependency management. home-manager installs packages for the current user only, which makes sense on non-NixOS systems. But on a single-user desktop system, I prefer having just one set of packages. Ha...

WASHINGTON (May 19, 2026 ) — Shield AI, the defense-tech company building state-of-the-art autonomy software and aircraft, today announced that the Office of the Under Secretary of War for Research and Engineering (OUSW R&E) has selected Shield AI to integrate its Hivemind autonomy software onto the Low-Cost Uncrewed Combat Attack System (LUCAS) , a new class of low-cost, one-way attack drones often referred to as kamikaze drones designed to operate in large numbers. The LUCAS program, d...

“Well, I’ve made up my mind, anyway. I want to see mountains again, Gandalf.” ― The Lord of the Rings Wānaka is a smaller, less commercialized resort town compared to Queenstown , with a population of around 13.000, but it's as exciting. On my way to Wānaka, I've had a quick stop at the Crown Range Lookout , which offers an amazing view over the Queenstown area — especially during the golden hour. Once reaching a cozy hostel in Wānaka, I was greeted by a fitting na...

I just got back from a three and a half week trip to Japan. It was the longest trip I have ever been on (aside from studying abroad in Germany, which felt different). I made the following wild circuit with only a backpack and a duffel: Tokyo Toyama Kanazawa Nara ish Ito Hakodate Nikko Mashiko Karuizawa Tokyo This trip was split into three parts: time with my immediate family, going to a conference, and then time with my partner. They were all great...

The BOOK 8088 was released a few years ago to massive fanfare among retro computer tragics like me. It was a modern laptop with newly designed parts wed to an Intel 8088 CPU and CGA graphics. The keyboard is mushy, and the screen acts more like an external panel that requires regular resolution and positioning adjustments… but I just love that such a device exists. I never thought I’d be able to sit at a cafe and work on an XT. I just wish I’d snagged a Hand 386 before they were disconti...

We just announced the first release of Datasette Agent , a new extensible AI assistant for Datasette. I've been working on my LLM Python library for just over three years now, and Datasette Agent represents the moment that LLM and Datasette finally come together. I'm really excited about it! Datasette Agent provides a conversational interface for asking questions of the data you have stored in Datasette. Add the datasette-agent-charts plugin and it can generate charts of your data as we...

A major shift in the housing market in the last several years is the rapidly increasing popularity of “build-to-rent” homes — single-family homes that are built specifically for the purpose of being rented out. According to the National Association of Homebuilders , build-to-rent homes have risen from less than 2% of new housing starts in the 1990s to more than 7% of housing starts today. In 2025, at least 68,000 new single-family housing starts were built to rent (and due to data limitat...

In the hours following the news that art-template fell victim to a supply chain attack via NPM, developers and systems administrators scrambled ensure all of their projects were unaffected from a supply chain attack where attackers have controlled the repository since 2025 and are using it to load unauthorized JavaScript from third party domains, including but not limited to Baidu Analytics. This is is due to the affected dependencies being distributed via NPM ...

In 2005, a Dutch startup called Booking.com offered hotels a deal: list your rooms on our platform for a 12% commission, and we will send you customers you would not otherwise reach. Hotels signed up; travelers followed, because the inventory was there, and by the early 2010s, Booking.com was the dominant hotel search platform across Europe and much of Asia. Then the commissions started climbing. By 2019, many hotels were paying 25-30% per booking, plus additional fees for “preferred placeme...

At NAB, I found a demo of Wi-Wi STAMP , a wireless time synchronization protocol that came out of Japan's NICT . Wi-Wi stands for Wireless 2Way interferometry, and it uses the 900 MHz band for picosecond-level time sync, and mm-level distance accuracy, in a tiny box, currently the size of a smartphone. The system is still in development, but existing prototypes have 20ps of phase synchronization jitter, and time synchronization down to 30ns. The next generation will have time down to ...

Over the past few months I’ve been working on a Linux distribution derived from Chimera Linux , and it’s now available for download. The distribution is called Casuarina Linux. It swaps out musl in Chimera for glibc to gain more binary compatibility with the wider GNU/Linux ecosystem. GNOME desktop on Casuarina Linux. Most of the heavy lifting was done by q66 in creating Chimera Linux. I used that excellent base to build C...

AI models are very capable and get more capable each year. So naturally people feel they’re underusing them. There’s a tweet that goes like: your laptop has a 100M USD startup in it, you just have to figure the right sequence of words to get it out. And beyond money, people imagine AI could boost them in every area of life. Thus all these perennial ideas: of an AI executive assistant, an AI tutor, an AI that curates your “digital garden”, an AI that (sigh) writes flashcards for you. T...

In software programming, the product between two integers is often computed to a fixed number of bits with overflow. Consider 8-bit integers. If you multiply 127 by 127, you get back the number 1 as an 8-bit unsigned integer, with an overflow. The actual full product is 16129. To represent 16129, you typically use 16 bits of precision. Thus we have the notion of the full product. The full product of two 32-bit integers is typically represented using 64 bits. The question that preoccupied me is...

My grandma archives food. Her pantry contains foods which literally expired last millenium. She fills her freezer chests with unlabeled takeout containers, desserts from Trader Joe's, and half-full slush drinks from Starbucks/Costco/Jamba/etc. I am unsure whether to consult Marie Kondo, an archaeologist, or a priest. True story: my wife once found a cat in her great aunt's refrigerator. They loved that cat but couldn't find the time to cremate its remains. Today is May 18, 2026. This i...

Vibe coding is building a software application by prompting an LLM, telling it what to build, trying it out, prompting for changes - but without looking at any of the code that the LLM generates. This technique can be used by people without any knowledge of programming. However the resulting software often shows problems with maintainability, correctness, and security - so is best used for disposable software written for a limited audience. The term was coined in February 2025 by An...

In April last year, Kelsey Piper discovered that OpenAI’s o3 model was surprisingly good at figuring out where a photo was taken from. Like human “geoguessr” pros , o3 could sometimes take a nondescript photo of a beach and tell you exactly where it is. Here’s the example Kelsey gave: Several people reproduced this with good results: not a 100% success rate, but clearly far better than you’d do with a random human guess. The lesson here is that m...

Let \(f\) be a function mapping binary strings of length \(m\) to strings of length \(n\) with \(n>m\). Since there are more strings of length \(n\) than \(m\), \(f\) is not onto. Can you find a string not in the range? This is known as the range avoidance problems, or AVOID for short  Let's do an example. Consider \(f\) that outputs an undirected graph on \(n\) nodes and takes as input: \(n\) A set \(S\) of \(k\) vertices \(v_1,\ldots,v_k\) For each \(i\) and \(j\), \(im\). Since there are mor...

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EDIT: of course this was already done in the past! I had little doubts but people just confirmed me about it on Twitter :) But, keep reading: the CRC32 compromise at the end is an interesting tradeoff, and this is a good discussion to have in general. Right now I'm working to an agent for my DS4 project. Local inference is token-poor, it's a battlefield where optimizations count. I was quite surprised by the fact the EDIT tool everybody is using right now forces the LLM to emit the old versio...